Dear Isabelle:

“When the pain started to creep up, I would slow down, go under my rock, as I call it, and remind myself that everything is temporary. Eventually, the pain would recede. It is difficult to keep this way of life”-

– this is one way of life, being under a rock, waiting for the pain to recede, then coming up, enjoying a moment here and there of living in the moment, with most moments in between are just surviving, waiting for no one or nothing in particular.

Ever since you were a child, your goal in life was to make your fragile mother strong, so that she can give you strength. As a child, you had no other choice but to form that goal. Now, as an adult in your fifth decade of life, it is time to admit defeat: you can’t make her strong so that she will make you strong. It is an impossibility.

The way for you to become reliably and consistently strong, is to give up on that old goal. Staying in contact with her will continue to fuel that goal, because at any time when you hear her voice, or see her smile, that old desire will come alive: to make her happy.

Not in contact with her, it will be your memories of her that will activate that old desire, plus there will be the guilt of supposedly making her so sad for not being in contact with you.

To become reliably and consistently strong, you have to choose sides: hers or yours. In other words: it cannot be she and you, that con-fused entity, but just you, nothing to do with her.. just you.

anita